Peaks and Valleys of Healthcare Industry

Healthcare outsourcing units are often described as adding a second arm to the Indian outsourcing business. After medical transcription, disease management and claim processing are the fastest growing areas of Healthcare BPO. The drop in the revenue of the medical transcription industry from $38 million in 2002 to $26 million in 2006 resulting in a loss of almost nine per cent per annum led many to believe as the first sign of the collapse of the health care BPO in India. A report by NASSCOM revealed that the Indian health care outsourcing industry can capture $800 million alone from U.S health care service by the end of 2005.

Industry analysts are of the opinion that competition in business arena, technological and legislative changes worldwide are the key factors in driving more business to this sector. NASSCOM in one of its report says, "The recent customer demand for new products and services, increase in competition and a real-time business environment are making BPO an important toll for achieving success for health care majors". The health care industry is in consistent pressure. The need for cost efficiency provides the Indian ITES industries with a huge potential. What the companies need is to tap this market in more sophisticated areas, like disease management, claim processing or imaging.

While the Indian companies have somewhat captured the U.S or U.K market, a huge market remains completely untapped in countries like Germany and France. Language constrain here plays an important part. Till date, U.S is the largest market provider for health care outsourcing. But to sustain the competition, the Indian BPO players need to explore its possibilities in these areas as well. Quality human resource pool with a sound knowledge and experience in complex applications remain to be the latent strength for the Indian Health care BPO. In addition to this they also provide value added services, like diagnostic review by medical professionals.

All these services are provided in the most possible cost efficient way and charges only a fraction of their U.S or U.K counterparts. Another prospective area of growth for the health care BPO is in Clinical Research Organizations. These organizations conduct pathological experiments of new drugs on patients. The criterion here is that the company must be accredited by the College Of American Pathology, the global standard for pathological governance for projects related to these experiments.

But while extending its limits, the health care BPO operates with the conventional limitations of Business Process Outsourcing units. Like any other process, data protection and information security pose to be the two major threats for this industry. The industry confronts a constant challenge in sensitizing information and client data. While the peaks of health care BPO look shining with more services and prospective clients from new geographical locations, the valleys of data security and confidentiality can not be overlooked.

Considering the huge possibility of this industry, the response for health care BPO was almost instant. They plunged into this industry in the form of medical transcription. But now it's time for them to move ahead of medical transcription, enhance their domain knowledge and add new verticals to their Healthcare BPO services.